drums and guitars fighting each other in final mix?

[goldenmean]

i think that i tracked everything pretty well. when i solo the drum tracks they sound great.. nice room sound, full eq's. same when i solo the guitar tracks.. they sound really good too.

but when i play them both together, the guitars seems to dominate over the drums in the mix. the drum room sound is especially getting killed. its not really a volume issue.. it seems like maybe the guitar freq is blurring out the drum freq.. esp the low end. ive messed around with limiters, eq, and compression some , but i dont really know what the proper thing to do here is. most of my adjustments seem to make it worse, or just as problematic only different sounding. any advice? should i bus them to seperater multi-band compressors?

[operator_tape]

I got the same problem

[MoreSpaceEcho]

some things i would try....

are the guitars hard panned? if not, hard l and r they go.

have you highpassed the guitars? if not try that. might help get rid of uneccesary low junk.

try parallel compressing the room mics. fast attack, adjust the release so its moving with the beat. bring that in under the uncompressed track and you should find it lends a lot of weight to the drums and helps them stand up against yer guitar onslaught.

you can try the same thing with the snare and/or kick.

if all of that still isn't doing it, try running the drums in mono (if you aren't already) which will leave more space on the sides for the guitars...

[8th_note]

How are the tracks panned? I too fight the same problem, particularly the guitars overwhelming the reverberant drum sound. I try to pan the guitars pretty far to the outside and focus the drum tracks very close to the center. That can help some. But if you've got thick guitars they are going to bury the drum "space".

One thing you can do is to put a reverb on an aux channel and then create an envelope to increase the reverb during the heavy guitar parts and reduce it at times when there is less, or no guitar. This can get you a bigger drum sound during the dense parts of the mix but allow the drums to not sound silly during quieter parts.

[drumsound]

Often times you need to do a few things that seem counter intuitive when you run into problems.

First stop using solo! You are mixing the different elements of the song. You are not going to present a just the drums or just the guitars to the listening audience, so focus on the big picture.

Hit the mono button. Panning is great for spreading out a mix and making things speak easily, but its really frequency response and relative levels that are going to make a difference here. Spend some time making the sounds work together tonally, and with good volume relationship, then worry about L-R placement

More Space Echo mentioned high passing the guitars. That's great advice. There's usually more crap happening in the low end of a guitar that is just sacrificing headroom and space in the mix. Another cool trick is to find out the really important frequencies of any given instrument. For instance if you have found a good place to add a bit of attack on the BD you might cut that frequency in the guitars and bass to make a hole for the BD attack to pop through.

Mixing is all about the relationship and interaction of the sources at hand.

[GooberNumber9]

+1 what Tony wrote.

I currenty do most of my mixing with the mono button on, then when I turn it off and start panning things everything starts to sound so much better.

Also, I like to put all the guitars through a stereo Aux fader, and all the drums through a stereo aux fader. I put the drum verb through the drum bus and the guitar verb through the guitar bus.

Then I do what Tony wrote about on the busses. So I put an EQ on the drum bus and I get a really narrow peak of about +12 dB and then I just sweep it up and down until the snare really stands out. Then I lower that and spread it out a little so it's more subtle. Then I take that same freqency and I go CUT it on the guitar tracks. That helps the snare poke through. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I really like to cut up a thick guitar sound with EQ. Yeah it makes the guitars sound kinda thin on their own, but if you're mixing 5 -10 tracks of guitars together and then adding them to a whole mix, you basically HAVE to thin them out or you won't be able to hear anything else.

I also set the guitar bus to a lower volume than I "think" they should be. I took a critical listen to Tool's "Stinkfist" one time and I was shocked to discover that the guitars are very thin and buried on that track, if you listen closely. Yet the whole song sounds huge!

In terms of panning, I usually either pan the drums narrow and the guitars wide, or vice-versa. I never pan them both wide or both narrow. Which way I go depends on the song and the tracking. If the drums are awesome I usually pan them wide and make the guitars live in a smaller space.

Keep working at it!

Todd Wilcox

[JWL]

Agree with the last 2 entries.

Look into "complimentary EQ" as well. Basically, you find the important frequencies in the elements that are fighting one another. Basically, find a frequency where the drum room sound you mention is at its most recognizable, and then boost that a couple-three dBs, and cut the exact same frequency the exact same amount in the guitars.

A distorted guitar is just a wideband mush of overtones, and they will easily overwhelm a mix. You need to find those characteristic bands from the other elements of your mix, and cut those frequencies back in the guitars. The key to a great mix is to cut them enough that everything sounds good and is recognizable, but not so much that you kill the life out of it.

[allbaldo]

First stop using solo! You are mixing the different elements of the song. You are not going to present a just the drums or just the guitars to the listening audience, so focus on the big picture.

I agree! My mixes improved greatly when I spent less time in solo.

Here's something I do when in your position... kinda crude, but it might work for you too. I bring the track I think is the offender..the guitar in your case.. up a little too loud for the song, then I make a fairly drastic cut in the midrange or low end, and sweep the cut around to see if I can find an area that is masking other things I want to hear in my mix. Then I narrow or widen the cue, and adjust the level of the cut to fit the mix, then put the instrument back in it's place in the mix.

It seems like a lot of times, a frequency that is masking other instruments is a frequency that the instrument in question does not need as much as I might like to hear it if the instrument is in solo. I hope this makes sense.

[amishsixstringer]

I do the exact opposite, but pretty much the same thing. I put a track a little low in the mix and then sweep around with a boost until it really pokes out of the mix and then back off on the boost a bit and bring it back up into the mix. I guess both ideas would work the same way, but I just wanted to throw out another option.


Neil

[thethingwiththestuff]

i think that i tracked everything pretty well. when i solo the drum tracks they sound great.. nice room sound, full eq's. same when i solo the guitar tracks.. they sound really good too.

dont!!